Let’s start by outlining the customer lifecycle
Acquisition - Adoption - Retention - Expansion
Every marketer has marketing funnels imprinted on their foreheads usually as early as they can remember, but what happens when you’ve gotten your customer through the door?
This is where adoption comes in.
Here are 2 ways we can define product adoption:
Product adoption describes the process of users becoming aware of (the features of) a product, understanding its value and beginning to use it
Product adoption, or user adoption, is the moment when users start to use your product features to accomplish the goals it was built to help with (I like this one)
I’d like to term adoption as a series of events or a major event that a customer needs to experience to derive value from your product or have their problem solved.
A lot of people will tell you that adoption is the product manager’s responsibility and while this is true (marketers get users through the door and whether these users stay or go depends on the quality of the product), there are things a product marketer does to help nudge the customer along on their journey.
A product adoption strategy is one way to help with this.
A product adoption strategy is simply mapping out the user journey and preparing a set of experiences to help the customer (and you), achieve your goals.
Think about an adoption strategy as a way to help users get to the moment of value faster.
How to support the adoption process with a product adoption strategy
Understand your persona(s) and their goals, segment your users: Different users use your product for different reasons. You need to identify these segments and tailor your onboarding and adoption strategy to meet their needs
Understand what successful & happy customers do with your product: Do a bit of research to find out what makes your happiest customers tick so you can optimise for this in your adoption strategy. This will help you nudge users towards the most valuable experiences (even the ones you may not have considered yet).
Define the key activation points: What are the key points your users need to reach to solve their problems using your product? Take time to identify this as your strategy will mostly be centred on this.
Map out your user’s journey against the times when they’ll need to take action to get the most value out of your product.
Tactics to drive Adoption
After you’ve mapped out your customer’s journey and the times they’ll need to discover or interact with each feature to get the most value. Map out the steps you need to take as a product marketer to nudge them into action using the available channels you have. Some of these channels include:
Email
In-app experiences (Product tours, Bots)
Push notifications
Identify the most effective channels you own and determine how you’ll use them to drive your customers to action.
Apply an adoption framework
Next, apply an adoption framework to your strategy. You can split your adoption framework into 4 parts. These parts apply during and after the onboarding process
Introductions
This is the meet and greet phase where you introduce your product and get your customers to perform the most critical tasks.
For Uber users, this task would be hailing their first ride. For Twitter users this could be following their first 30 accounts. For Netflix, this is watching their first show.
If you worked at any of these companies, how would you help accelerate the process? If you worked at Netflix, maybe send a email or push notification showing what’s popular right now based on their favourite category.Increase use
Here, your customers have performed the basic tasks needed to derive value from your product so, what’s next? Suggest features they can use based on their goals (you should know this based on their segments). Nudge them to explore secondary features.
Here are some other things you should focus on at this stage:Pointing them to key contacts and resources where they can get help if they need it
Acknowledge activities: Acknowledge the progress they’ve made and the actions they’ve taken.
Prompts and reminders: If they’re at the stage where they should take a certain action, you can send a reminder or prompt, just so they keep your product top of mind.
Reduce churn
Feed your users helpful “how-to” content an encourage them to get more out of your product by upgrading their plans.
Re-engage your inactive users by reaching out and getting information on why they haven’t been using the product. Depending on the feedback, act on it to show you’re committed to keeping them.
This is also a great point to figure out how you’re doing. Get your new customers to give you feedback on the product or the onboarding process so far.Driving adoption could be the responsibility of customer success, product management or product marketing depending on the company you work at. Companies are different depending on size and capacity so if there’s a possibility you could work on adoption wherever you work next, a little know-how doesn’t hurt!
Content referenced in this article
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